On Ambition, Cocktail Party Invitations, and the “Bizarre Compulsion” to Write

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Recently there’s been a ruckus regarding the blatant pursuit of literary fame, especially where the n+1 editors are concerned. In the current issue of Poetry, Adam Kirschplumbs the depths of literary ambition and the desire for personal recognition, and classifies Keith Gessen’sAll The Sad Young Literary Men as “a chemically pure example of the kind of literary ambition that has less to do with wanting to write well than with wanting to be known as a writer.” Kirsch uses Gessen’s blatant ambition, both the theme and the generating force behind his novel, as the springboard to consider the writer’s desire for acknowledgement. While Kirsch criticizes Gessen’s “naive directness,” it becomes obvious that if Gessen’s work is a vehicle for recognition and status, he has done well for himself. Not only was Gessen lauded at the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 soiree recently and a co-host of the New New York Intellectual series at the New School, but he continues to write for esteemed periodicals like the New York and London Review of Books and receive acknowledgement, if not praise, from established critics, Kirsch included.

Gessen is certainly not the first writer to wear his ambitions on his sleeve. He follows in a long line of writers, including Laurence Sterne. Sterne claimed he wrote Tristram Shandy, “not to be fed, but to be famous.” And become famous he did. Not only did he have a race horse and a country dance named after his novel, but he became a celebrity. His popularity did not wane with the less favorable reviews of the later portions of his serialized work, because, according to the Columbia History of the British Novel, his fans “wanted not just the book but the man behind the book (one reader said ‘I’d ride fifty miles just to smoke a pipe with him’).” Perhaps if Gessen were more honest about his ambitions, we could find something humorous, or at least endearing, in it all. Perhaps then his readers would write in that they’d want to have a smoke with him too.

And yet, despite all odds, there are the writers who seem indifferent to fame. Edward P. Jones is one of those. In his essay, “We Tell Stories,” he divides writers into two groups: those who aspire to “be invited to a lifetime of cocktail parties” and those who write because of some “bizarre compulsion.” If Gessen falls into the first group, Jones (by his own admission) falls into the second. This was apparent on Thursday evening, when Jones read from an enclave on Tenth Street known as the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, in what by appearances was once a living room, replete with a fireplace and mantel, a multi-paned front window, and a crowd of attentive readers sitting on folding chairs. From his second book of short stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones read about temptation (in the form of the Devil himself, appearing at a Safeway off Good Hope Road) and transformation (going blind, literally, in the blink of an eye).

In person, Jones is humble and unassuming, and he sounds calm and wise, if not quite comfortable speaking in front of a large audience. His voice came alive when reading the scene from the bus in “Blindsided,” where Roxanne first goes blind, a scene that deftly combines compassion, humor and desperation. One senses that Jones’s imaginative generosity would be constrained if he paid more mind to increasing his literary status than developing his characters and telling their stories. While speaking about writing The Known World, he posits that if he’d read forty books to research his novel as he’d initially planned, “the characters may have taken a back seat.” And this, to Jones as well as to his readers, would have been detrimental, because “the research doesn’t matter if the characters aren’t there.”

Jones’s humility and lack of ambition were enough to make the man sitting next to me comment in disbelief. Perhaps it is precisely this long gestation – Jones’s long periods spent growing and developing his characters – his willingness to stand back, and his lack of desire to conquer literary heights that has made his work so remarkable and the lives of his characters, even in his short stories, stretch far beyond, one feels, the pages they’re written on. While Jones hinted at currently searching for new characters, the only thing he admitted to working on was “getting back to Washington in one piece.” He spoke a few times of a woman in the desert, as if he’s tilling and planting the seeds for his next crop. We can wait.

Jones tramples the idea of literary celebrity. If Gessen worships at the altar of literature, and through writing hopes to elevate himself, Jones hopes to deflate such notions of becoming a literary chosen one. To Jones, writing is an act of compassion and communication, and his process not so different from any other task: “And we are not noble, just human. We get up to our day, however wonderful, however horrible, as they have been doing since there were white blank pages, before the blank computer screen, when there were only grunts and hand gestures, and we tell stories.”

Besides, good writing is timeless, and literary celebrity is often short-lived. There is backlash, capricious fashion, and the the vicissitudes of time. The quest for literary renown isn’t new, nor is praise from the literary world consistent. A little article entitled “Literary Fame,” appearing in the Buffalo Courier and reprinted in the November 12, 1890, New York Times, speaks of fleeting fame, specifically Herman Melville’s, and how easily one can slip from favor. A year before Melville’s death, so little was said of him that most people already thought him dead:

Forty-four years ago, when [Herman Melville’s] most famous tale, “Typee,” appeared, there was not a better known author than he, and he commanded his own prices. Publishers sought him, and editors considered themselves fortunate to secure his name as a literary star. And to-day! Busy New York has no idea he is even alive, and one of the best-informed literary men in the country laughed recently at me statement that Herman Melville was his neighbor by only two blocks. “Nonsense!” said he. “Why, Melville’s dead these many years!” Talk about literary fame! There’s a sample of it.

Anne K. Yoder
is a staff writer for The Millions. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She currently lives in Chicago, where she's at work on a novel. Read more of her work here: http://annekyoder.tumblr.com.

Chinese readers can't forget her; most Western readers have never met her. This year, on the 20th anniversary of her death, the NYRB edition of Chang’s 'Naked Earth' provides an opportunity for new readers to fall in love.

When I was twelve, I read a lot. I read novels in the cafeteria over chicken patties while my friends traded folded-paper fortune tellers, and I read novels on the bus ride home while my friends relocated to seats with travelers who would talk to them. I read novels while I walked home from the bus stop, and for half hour stretches in the bathroom until my legs had fallen asleep. There never seemed a good point at which to put down the book, pull up my pants and relocate to a chair, so I stayed seated.
The books I read today can still inspire this total preoccupation, but more rarely. Often, I only have an allotted hour or so to read before I have to turn off my light and play slave to my impending alarm clock. My “real” life is never far from mind; reading is just a part of my day. But last night I lay in bed with Mockingjay, the third installment of Suzanne Collins’Hunger Games series, not reading but devouring the book, transported not only to the fictional world of Panem, but to the years when I always read like this: flopping from back to stomach as the hours passed, jumping at every creak of the house, and finishing late, late at night, reluctant to release my hands from the book and a delicious disorientation that would be gone by morning.
My former self understands these feelings, and happily, so does my cousin’s son, Will. I know he reads like this because I’ve seen him, shooing his football-toting friends away at the beach because he can’t abandon Harry, Ron and Hermione at such a crucial moment. He’s got an English-teacher-turned-college-professor for a mom, and an older brother tossing worn copies of The Golden Compass and Percy Jackson his way, so he’s been reading for a while now, and he’s got discriminating taste. He’s the recent recipient of Cedar Mountain Primary School’s Accelerated Reader Award, but the prize is incidental. Kid’s got a love of the game.
With Twilight and The Hunger Games securing a vast readership among the young and older, Will and I are not an anomaly as we sit and excitedly discuss Harry Potter, he ten and me twenty-three. As we’re working our way from The Sorcerer’s Stone to The Deathly Hallows with great attention to both cherished and forgotten detail, he’s the book-club I didn’t have as a twelve year old Madeline L’Engle addict. We started talking because I was hoping to glean a few book recommendations from him to write about, and so I’m taking notes. Exhibiting his careful attention to fellow readers and his strong loyalty to story, our conversation is punctuated by uncertain pauses preceding each recounting of a momentous plot twist. “I don’t know if you should write this in case anyone hasn’t read it yet,” Will warns me.
That is one of the great appeals of young adult literature: there is so much plot to spoil. Storytelling is paramount here, and the sheer imagination of the author is so awesome that enjoyment overpowers any hint of farfetchedness. And while, yes, the Harry Potter books are about wizards, our own Muggle concerns are reflected in the struggle of good against evil, and the difficulty we sometimes have distinguishing the two. In the spirit of C.S. Lewis, the best young adult fiction today embraces universal themes and compelling moral ambiguity. These stories captivate our attention because they are adventures in the deeper dramas that inform human experience. They are life and death stripped of daily distraction.
As we sit over a hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Will and I try to articulate what we love about this series and about The Hunger Games. It is difficult to express the emotionally charged relinquishing of reality and the fervor and flush that comes with truly inhabiting a fictional world. “Just the idea of the book,” he shrugs, stumped. “Just the story.”
With imaginative and driving plots that are both similar and alien to your everyday world, in the really good books, the characters are rich and complicated, but when they are not, it doesn’t really matter. They are doing, and you are reading as fast as you can.
Of course, one of the reasons you can read this fast is that the language doesn’t always delight your synapses or persuade you to kick off your shoes and stay awhile. When I’m reading Collins’ writing, I’m not savoring a sentence like I do when I’m reading Michael Chabon. The plainspoken pulse of The Hunger Games doesn’t beg a reread like the poetry of The God of Small Things, or set you still like a scene of Cormac McCarthy’s. But I’m not reading Mockingjay for those reasons. I’m reading to find out whether the Capitol mutations bred deliberately to hunt Katniss are going to tear her to pieces before she manages to kill President Snow.
Books hinging on this level of intensity burn a haze that muddles your Muggle world and your Hogwarts world. As in a dream, you have no difficulty surrendering to the unrealities: the story holds you. Sometimes it holds you merely until an unwelcome interruption by your real life, but sometimes it lingers after the book is closed, unwilling to be relegated back to fiction. Young Will confesses to me that Harry Potter’s unlikely entrance into wizardry clung to him in this way. “I was really hoping that when I turned eleven I would be found to be a wizard. I felt that it was so real. I thought that maybe J.K. Rowling was a wizard... and I kept on feeling that. But then, after I read the next series that I really liked, I didn’t feel that anymore, and I knew that it was definitely, one hundred percent fake. But… it really seemed real. The whole way.”
The yearning in Will’s voice brings me back to my own youthful reading of the Harry Potter books, with a swift and sudden nostalgic ache. For Will isn’t yet eleven, and the force with which he instructs me on the odds against his dormant wizardry has the hardness of a person reprimanding himself for a foolishness. He isn’t waiting for his eleventh birthday. He knows better. But maybe this is why reading these YA books can be such a wholly captivating experience for adults. We have no choice but to surrender our reasons to the terrors and beauties of a make-believe world. And it really seems real.

One of my favorite aspects of working in a bookstore was recommending stock to customers. Since I've kept a tight grip on my "to read" list my entire literate life, I was always puzzled and delighted by these strangers in need of book advice. What great power a bookseller has! It's incredibly gratifying to watch a customer purchase a novel or biography because you convinced them to do so; it's even better when they return to thank you for the recommendation.I've recently become obsessed with the book choosing rituals of those around me. Are you the type to buy a book recommended by the cashier at your local bookstore? Or maybe you're like my friend Lisa, who falls down the Amazon rabbit hole, one recommendation begetting another. My friend Allison decides on books based on their last word. Seriously. Trusted Millions leader Max has an intense book choosing system known as The Reading Queue. Max's process is impressive, but the lack of choice would feel burdensome to me. I only buy one book at a time because I can't handle the expectation and pressure of so many unread books in my apartment, crying out: Pick me! Pick me! When I purchase something, I read it soon after - I scratch that reading itch.Three years ago, Patrick wrote two posts (here and here) about his gender equalizing reading experiment, in which he alternated between reading books by men and books by women. The results were positive: the project broadened his reading habits, and he now reads authors of both genders pretty evenly. I haven't done anything so regimented, but his experiment did encourage me to shake up my own reading practices. I now keep statistics of what I've read, so that I can keep an eye on my tendencies, and go against them if I need to.For instance, I've read 12 books since January 1st, 5 by women and 5 by men, the remaining two being anthologies. On the male-to-female ratio, I'd say things are looking good. So far, I've only read 2 books of nonfiction, but for me, that's an improvement. Last year, my 3 books of nonfiction were all about food or food production, so this year I'm branching out to other topics; in 2008 I've read Bill Buford'sHeat (food, again), and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc'sRandom Family (not food), and was incredibly moved by the latter. I always read a large number of short story collections, but this year those numbers will decrease because I want to read more novels (to help with writing one). Four months into the year, I've failed on my dead authors quota. So far, I've read only half of Jude the Obscure. Patrick has offered to assassinate Joshua Ferris for me, whose novel Then We Came to the End I'm currently reading, but I think that's a little extreme. I hope to dip into Flaubert and Wharton this summer to make up for this deficiency.My latest 2008 reading goal is to read more books in translation, something I rarely do. Good thingThe Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano is waiting in the wings. What are you reading this year, and why?

The complicated upstairs-downstairs dynamic on PBS’s Downton Abbey is arguably the reason viewers keep coming back for more -- even after the Grantham-Crawley melodrama has become almost too much to bear. They long for that moment of recognition to arrive, when the unobtrusive servant, usually so well-hidden in the basement or attic, is caught in the act of, well, service. They are hurriedly straightening up the library while the family takes luncheon elsewhere, but plans have changed and now the silent majority, the laboring poor trained in the art of self-effacement, must engage in a highly charged, awkward, and reverent dance called “conversation with your master.”
If Downton is to be taken at its word, this is not a purely financial arrangement. British servants regard their masters as major celebrities; a few garner mockery and disdain, but they are unlikely to ever learn of this reputation. Most are held in great esteem, their smallest gesture of kindness dissected and debated for weeks on end. Despite the occasional seemingly altruistic gesture -- access to a marriage-bed for the night or use of a fashionable lawyer for a wrongly accused murderer -- the Granthams and Crawleys, however desperate to cast their gaze on anything out of the ordinary, do not seem to fret about their help in the same way. In the end, any violation of social distance proves to be a minor annoyance forgotten as soon as the erring servant’s back rights the situation, either up against the wall or seen from the back, scurrying down the hall.
At least, that is the case for the inhabitants of Downton, a grand house that is within itself a dying breed, but the 18 years Nellie Boxall served as cook to Virginia Woolf, however, were a far more fraught affair than the coupling of Lady Mary Grantham and Matthew Crawley ever was, full of emotional blackmail and power struggles. Boxall and Woolf had staged battle royals that left both parties smarting.
The Grantham ladies live under the same roof as a cast of female relations, including mother and sisters and nearby Grandmama, who is either present, on her way, or just leaving, but Woolf was motherless by age 13. Her sister was off living her own life elsewhere, and while they corresponded and visited, Boxall was the closest person she had to a female family member to take care of her. Woolf is perhaps as well-known for her contributions to the literary canon as her proclivity towards mental instability, all of which made the delicate circumstances a writer requires all the more difficult to obtain. As she famously wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Leonard slept in his own room, and Boxall was paid to ensure Woolf’s was in fine form.
In other words, Woolf’s needs were great, and though her comparatively smaller flats could have been neatly tucked away in a forgotten wing of Downton, most middle-class British households had one or more servants. Boxall was hired as the Woolf’s live-in servant at 52 Tavistock Square, where the writer would draft Mrs Dalloway. All the while, Nellie was hard at work in the background, pumping the water, lighting the lamps, making the beds, and emptying the chamber pots -- more than her title of “cook” suggests, though she did that as well, serving multiple courses three times a day.
Few scholars have parsed Woolf’s diaries without commenting on her frequent, detailed, and often vitriolic accounts of Boxall. Their brand of melee was firmly mired in a cycle, each arguing her points with the tools available to them. Boxall howled and cried, and then threatened to leave, which she would not, but the threat greatly destabilized and embarrassed Woolf. For her part, Woolf recognized, if not predicted, the attraction, writing, “If I were reading this diary...I should seize with greed upon the portrait of Nelly & make a story -- perhaps make the whole story revolve around that.” No character on Downton would ever suggest such a thing, for to know that much about a servant or to speak intimately with strangers about one’s master would be, respectively, terribly boring and treasonous.
Much like the relationship between master and servant, Woolf was in charge of everything that went into those diaries, which were then posthumously dissected over and over again on the pages of countless biographies -- including the misspelling of Boxall’s name. As Alison Light wrote in her exceptional book, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, “Woolf and her subsequent biographers and critics refer to ‘Nelly’ Boxall, but, as I discovered, she is ‘Nellie’ on her birth and death certificates, she always signed herself as ‘Nellie’, and that is how her relatives spelt her name.”
Light figured out a bit more about Boxall than just the proper spelling of her name. The majority of Woolf scholars have too easily forgiven the master-servant dynamic in her household, too distracted by the significance of her artistic contributions and unquestioning of her sometimes contradictory political ideals. Herbert Marder is such a case, having focused on the works of Woolf since his dissertation at Columbia in the 1960s. In The Measure of Life, he wrote “Nellie was a natural manipulator who knew how to disarm her mistress, first getting under her skin and then exploiting her guilt.”
Woolf would certainly approve of such an assessment, but Marder does not appear particularly concerned with the absent, competing narrative, which could temper some of the seemingly harsh observations. Boxall was orphaned by the age of 12 and working by 14, so perhaps “manipulation” was mistaken for “will to survive.” After Boxall did something nice, like pick seven pounds of blackberries for Woolf’s favorite jam, bike for miles in order to procure cream for a favorite dish, or care for a woman who was at once fiercely independent and greatly in need of serious attention, Woolf noted that these gestures were borne out of genuine affection, and maybe, just maybe, the giver deserved compassion: “after all she has no other. And one tends to forget it.”
If Boxall was anything, it was dependent. Woolf boasted, “nothing I can do will prevent their loving me!” to the composer Ethel Smyth, and surely such a long, passionate relationship involved some grade of love, but Boxall had readily apparent, pragmatic motivations as well. She lived with the Woolfs, and had no family home waiting for her. In this way, she is much like Downton’s Daisy, the young kitchenmaid who, when offered an extraordinary opportunity to inherent her late husband’s family farm, admits she has never even contemplated a life outside of service. But this vestige of Victorianism had been on the decline since the 1890s, and women had options outside the home -- their own or someone else’s. They could work in shops or factories, or apply some of those ‘domestic’ skills and become florists or beauticians. Those jobs would at least allow them a modicum of free time, with nights and weekends off, used for socializing or pursing other interests. As Light explained, “the regular callers, the hawkers and peddlers, who had been so much a part of the Victorian street, began to diminish,” and with them, the excitement of meeting someone new and the back door. It is also worth noting that the Woolfs’ fortunes greatly improved during the 18 years Boxall worked for them, but they paid her about six pounds less than the national average. Meanwhile, they readily updated the house with new domestic technology that made Boxall’s life easier, but also diminished her importance in the home.
Boxall certainly facilitated optimal writing conditions at times, and greatly hindered them at others. Her complaints were not unfathomable, given her substantial work load. Swollen ankles and a bad back might have been tolerated in relative silence if, she seemed to tell Woolf, her efforts were appreciated. “Nellie Boxall was one of the majority throughout history who had made their presence felt through surliness or tears, downright disobedience, petty acts of revenge (like spitting up on soup) or vicious talk,” wrote Light. Nellie communicated her grievances through dramatic scenes, which Woolf found distracting and "degrading," but nonetheless chose to obsess over them for nearly two decades.
Woolf recounted and appraised “the famous scene” at Tavistock Square in London over and over again in her diary. After a particularly bad argument, Boxall ordered Woolf out of her room, one she inhabited but technically belonged to her masters. “In her closest relationships -- with Vanessa, Leonard, Nellie, Vita, and Ethel -- Virginia knew she wanted mothering and protection but she also distrusted ‘the maternal passion,’” explained Light. This was not a weak moment for Woolf, and she did not need to be reminded of instances in which Boxall had played the stern but kind parental figure. She could not decide if Boxall, by ordering her out of the room, had treated her like a child or a servant; in the end, it did not matter, for Woolf was resolute. This time, Boxall would go. She spent the following weeks rapt with expectation, engrossed in preparation for any possible scenario. She copied out and practiced reading aloud various replies to what she expected Boxall to say. “I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind,” wrote Woolf, the very same woman who had railed against men’s use of ‘the female mind.’
To be fair, a world free of Boxall was just part of this fantasy. Woolf had grown up in large family cared for by a staff of seven, but she was a progressive woman of independent means. Her needs were different than her parents’, and most certainly her father’s, who she felt, like Boxall, was a fervid extortionist who dealt in histrionics. She would never again tolerate any outsider in her home, nor would she allow employees or friends to establish such intimacies. “I shall make no attachments ever again,” she wrote to Smyth in a celebration of her triumph, a scenario she no doubt presented as a thinly veiled warning. Her village cook, the young mother Annie Thompsett, was gone by 3:00 in the afternoon, and the Woolfs quickly adapted to, if not relished in, having an empty house to themselves for the first time in their marriage.
“After eighteen years I at last got rid of an affectionate domestic tyrant,” Woolf wrote to her sister in July of 1934, still reliving the dissolution in her correspondence. The termination had predictably devolved into quite a scene, with Boxall refusing to take a severance and Woolf upset she made off with the cookery books and a chair cover. Readers know Woolf’s eventual fate, but Boxall’s life took a favorable turn. She was soon hired by the famous British couple of the stage and screen, Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, and quickly adjusted to her glamorous new life in a well-staffed, lavish but bohemian household, where her cooking was appreciated by the likes of Marlene Dietrich. Boxall enjoyed her own brush with fame, featured in an ad for a gas cooker. The tagline read, “Mr. & Mrs. Charles Laughton’s cook tells you how to roast beef to perfection.”
In the immediate aftermath of their breakup, Woolf got her peace, and Boxall her recognition, but they could not avoid each other forever. Bloomsbury society was small, and sure enough, the Woolfs showed up for dinner cooked by Boxall. Happy Powley, Elsa Lanchester’s maid, took note of the relationship between the famous author and her now friend and coworker in her diary, which stands in stark contrast to Woolf’s entries on the subject. It was Boxall who “had to leave because she was a bit high strung…of course you know Virginia Woolf was.”
If Boxall had residual anger towards her late employer, she did not seize an appearance on the national stage to vent her grievances. By the time Boxall appeared on the BBC radio in 1956, Woolf had drowned herself 15 years earlier. In what Light describes as a “quiet, meditative voice with a slight country burr,” Boxall spoke about her late ex-employer lovingly, emphasizing mutual acts of kindness, not recrimination, towards each other. She was not well when I met her, Boxall explained before launching into a lengthy description of all the special dishes she made to tempt Woolf into wellness. She even praised her former employer, calling upon a questionable event years earlier. When Boxall was sick in the hospital, Woolf financed her recovery in order to interview replacements, informing her she was not needed upon return, a threat she perhaps meant to execute, but eventually relented. Instead, Boxall remembered that “She came to see me in the ward carrying a huge pineapple and came straight up to the bed and cuddled me up.”
Whether it is the highly sanitized, anachronistic Downton or the long and tumultuous saga of the incompatible Boxall and Woolf, one thing is abundantly clear: The bond of servant and master is peculiar and problematic, then and now, as any relationship based on gross inequality is bound to be. What on earth do we make of all of this? Go ahead and count down the days until Julian Fellowes bestows another season of Downton on us, because it offers what fiction does: good fun at a benign distance.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.

Few books caused as much of a stir last year as The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan's examination of the American food production system. It exposed, among other things, the fact that Americans are eating way, way too much corn. Corn is in nearly everything at the supermarket, from the corn chips (duh!) to the meat to the walls of the building itself. The most prevalent use of corn, as some of you can no doubt guess, is high-fructose corn syrup, a sugar substitute found in nearly every kind of processed food. The effects of this diet, high in refined carbohydrates, are evident all around us. How can Americans - a people obsessed with dieting and health food - be so tragically unhealthy?This paradox and others are the subject of Pollan's new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. First published as an essay in the New York Times Magazine, In Defense of Food traces the rise of "nutritionism" - the ideology that states that the best way to understand food is as a sum of its component parts. This ideology took hold of food science sometime in the early 60s, changing how Americans thought about eating:Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood. For to enter a world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help.Nutritionism became politically useful in the 1970s, when the federal government, reacting to soaring rates of heart disease in post-WWII America, tried to tell people to eat less red meat and dairy products. Cattle ranchers took issue with this idea, and nutritionism came to their rescue. After considerable pressure from the meat and dairy industries, the government backed down. "Plain talk about actual foodstuffs - the committee had advised Americans to 'reduce consumption of meat' - was replaced by artful compromise: "choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake.'" With that one sentence, the meat and dairy industry was able to shift the blame for heart disease from a kind of food to a nutrient - saturated fat.As Pollan points out, saturated fat was the first nutrient to be vilified, but hardly the last. Anyone who tried the Atkins diet can tell you with what low esteem most Americans held carbohydrates in the early 21st Century. For each villain nutrient, a counterpoint must exist. For every saturated fat, carbohydrate, or trans fat there is the corresponding "good" cholesterol, antioxidant, or omega 3 fatty acid of which we must certainly get more. The trouble with the science behind nutritionism is that we simply don't know enough about how these nutrients work to properly utilize them (except in whole foods, where these nutrients exist naturally).Take for instance nutritional supplements. For years, we've been told by scientists (and their journalist mouthpieces) that supplementing our diets with pills containing omega 3s or antioxidants would help us be healthier. It turns out this isn't the case. Studies have shown that people who take supplements are healthier than the general population, but this is likely because they are the kind of people who take supplements. In other words, they are educated people who take a greater interest in their health and are therefore more likely to eat nutritious foods and exercise. The supplements themselves had no positive effects, and in some cases, they had negative ones. Beta-carotene, found naturally in several foods, including carrots, is a terrific antioxidant. On its own, as it is in a supplement, beta-carotene actually acts as a pro-oxidant and has been linked to several types of cancers.Where does this leave the American eater? If we can't trust those health labels in the supermarket, if the scientists and journalists don't know for sure what causes food to be beneficial or harmful, what the heck should we do? What should we eat? Pollan spends the final part of the book answering these questions with several general guidelines of how and what to eat. These include fairly straightforward ideas, like "Eat mostly plants, especially leaves," to other, not so obvious ideas, like "Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism." What does he mean by that latter rule? Don't eat anything new? Hardly. Pollan spends much of the book arguing for a return to the food culture of our great-great grandparents, who ate foods like apples, potatoes, bread, milk, eggs, rather than things like mini-bagel pizzas, Cheetos, Snackwells, etc. When Pollan suggests avoiding non-traditional foods, he's really proscribing foods made from soy that weren't traditionally made from soy. So tofu is okay, but soy milk might be suspect. The reasons behind this particular bit of advice are well grounded, in that soy eaten in curd form is a terrific source of protein, while other forms of soy do little other than add needless estrogen to our bodies.In Defense of Food succeeds in offering a path to a healthier life (it's succeeded in getting me out early every Sunday morning to hit the farmers market), but it's far from flawless. Pollan readily acknowledges that not everyone in America can afford to eat the way that he does. One of his rules is to pay more for less food (in other words, pay for smaller quantities of higher quality food). One has to wonder how the working poor in America would react to that suggestion. Pollan's advice is aimed at the segment of the American population that can afford to pay more for their produce and meat, but doesn't. At times, Pollan falls into the trap of using food science to attack itself, citing one study to rebuke or debunk another. He sees the hypocrisy in this, but can never fully escape the language and assumptions inherent to the field.Pollan acknowledges these flaws, but skirts around a greater one, in my opinion. Much of Pollan's suggestions point towards a retreat from the modern American food production system, a system run by corporations like Cargill and Archer-Daniels-Midland. These corporations, in the interest of bottom line profits, have created a system that produces enormous quantities of poor quality food, by choosing varieties of vegetable based on yield rather than nutritional quality, by dousing those crops with chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and by stuffing cattle with unnatural foods (cows were never meant to eat corn, yet most eat nothing but for the last few months of their lives) and antibiotics. This system serves no one's best interests but those of their shareholders. The system pollutes the land (bovine flatulence produces more greenhouse gas every year than automobiles), destroys the American family farm, and, make no mistake about it, is slowly destroying our bodies. The food these companies produce is cheap, but when the secondary costs are considered, is it worth it? Pollan stops short of taking any of these companies to task, and comes nowhere near stating equivocally that the globalization of food production has actually robbed us of nutritious food. In a book that claims to be a manifesto, I expected a little more vitriol.Part 2